Senate report: Fort Hood massacre could have been averted

The Fort Hood massacre allegedly carried out by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan could have been prevented, a year-long Senate report concluded Thursday.

AP photo

Sens. Joe Lieberman, Ind-Connecticut, and Susan Collins, R-Maine

The exhaustive inquiry by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs said the FBI and the Army failed to act on evidence “in plain sight” that the 40-year-old Army psychiatrist was communicating with radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen and becoming an increasingly radicalized Muslim during his medical training at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

“The painful conclusion is that Fort Hood attack could have and should have been prevented,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who chairs the Senate panel.

The mass shooting on Nov. 5, 2009, killed 13 people and wounded 32 at a facility processing GIs preparing to deploy or returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

The FBI failed to tell the Army before the attack that Hasan had come to its attention because of his repeated email traffic with al-Awlaki, an American born Islamic cleric who has since been put on a shoot-on-sight list by President Obama.

The FBI conducted an “all to cursory” investigation into Hasan’s activities and left unresolved a disputed assessment between Joint Terrorism Task Forces in San Diego and in Washington, D.C., over the potential threat that he may have posed. The report found repeated delays in the FBI inquiry into Hasan that ended when an analyst mistakenly relied on Hasan’s “sanitized officer evaluation reports” concluded that he posed no danger.

Senior Army officers also ignored evidence that Hasan was “a ticking time bomb” during medical training at Walter Reed, where he allegedly told colleagues that revenge might be a defense for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Hasan also expressed sympathy for terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and defended suicide bombers.

“The officers who kept Hasan in the military and moved him steadily along knew full well of his problematic behavior,” the report found. “As the officer who assigned Hasan to Fort Hood (and later decided to deploy Hasan to Afghanistan) admitted to an officer at Fort Hood, ‘you’re getting our worst.'”

The 89-page Senate report, the most definitive public accounting of government awareness of Hasan’s pre-attack activities, was sent to the Pentagon, the FBI and the national intelligence community with a committee request for reaction “as soon as possible.” Lieberman said the report also was being sent to President Obama.

The report urged the Pentagon to develop policies that would enable service members to identify and warn superiors about evidence of “violent Islamist extremism” emerging in the ranks. The panel also urged FBI headquarters to more fully integrate the 56 field offices so that tips and evaluations are more quickly and widely shared about potential terrorist targets.

Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the ranking Republican on the panel, said the memory of Fort Hood victims would be honored “if the recommendations of this report are adopted quickly so the next `ticking time bomb’ can be spotted early and defused before another deadly detonation.”

Hasan awaits the next step in pre-trial proceedings following a three-member Army “sanity” board’s finding in late January that the U.S. citizen of Palestinian descent was sane and fit to stand trial on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder.

Army Col. Morgan Lamb, the special court martial convening authority, has granted a delay in the case until Feb. 23 when Hasan’s lawyers are scheduled to meet with the Army officer overseeing the case. A final decision on proceeding to trial will be made by the commanding general at Fort Hood.